Creative Spirit Blog September 16, 2026 Importance of Color in Your Painting

Echo's of the Past Collage

“Mere color can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways,”  Oscar  Wilde

Color and value are a vital part of a painting. Color can bring about many powerful emotions.  How we, as artists, use it in our paintings can evoke different emotions in different people, so it is good to know the range of emotions a color can evoke, but keep in mind that our life experiences have a lot to do with how we perceive them.

Warm colors: those in the red, orange and yellow families can spark emotions ranging from love and warmth to hostility and danger. Colors of the setting sun and fire.

       Red:  Is a high-energy color.  It is associated with love, passion, power, strength, war and danger.  It has also been known to increase the metabolism, respiration rate, and your blood pressure.  It demands the viewers’ attention.

·       Orange: Combines the energy found in red with the happiness found in yellow and represents creativity and determination.  It is associated with enthusiasm and success. 

·       Yellow: The color of joy, happiness, intellect and cheerfulness.  It has been known to stimulate mental activity.  It is an attention getter. However, if you use too much it can have a disturbing effect on the viewer.  Because of literary references, it has also been associated with cowardice. 

Cool colors: those in the green, blue and purple families, can spark feelings that range from calm to sadness.  The cool green of the grass to the foggy purple mist of a rainy morning.

·       Green: Is the color of nature.  It symbolizes growth, harmony, fertility, and wisdom.   It has great healing powers and can slow metabolism and can calm the mind.  It is also the color of envy and jealousy

·       Blue: It is the color of stability.  It is associated with elements in nature, sky, sea, and distant mountains.  It is the color of youth, spirituality, truth, peace, order, and the yearning spirit.

·       Purple: Combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. It symbolizes royalty, dignity, magic, and mystery.  It is associated with wisdom, dignity and independence…”When I am Old, I’ll Wear Purple” 

We can change the emotional effect of any color with the drop of white or black, when we make tints and shades of a specific color; or mix our opposite colors and change the colors intensity.  When a color is placed next to another color it appears one way, when placed next to a different color it can look totally different. It is a phenomenon called “simultaneous contrast."

White standing alone usually stands for purity and cleanliness.  Black alone is most often associated with formality or death and grief. 

Learning to mix colors and use colors in a harmonious way is very important to get our message to our viewer. It is a powerful tool for any artist because it not only tells our story it evokes feeling in the viewer.

“Color is one of the great things in this world that makes it worth living…”   Georgia O’Keeffe